Monitoring and maintenance methods for rotating machinery, such as generators, motors and turbo-machinery, currently lack sufficiently reliable for accurately indicating certain important problems, such as cracking of power transmission components or their structural support members, inadequacy of local lubrication, excessive wear, shorted insulation, stator winding faults, and various other failures. Rotating machinery faults and failures lead to unnecessary expenses, which could be avoided by timely repair or scheduled maintenance. The occasional catastrophic failure of rotating machinery can result in costly repairs and system down time, having a rippling effect on businesses dependent on the plant machinery or the power generated by the plant machinery. Downtime caused by a failure of rotating machinery reduces productivity and profitability.
Therefore, there is a need to monitor rotating machinery to reliably predict development of a failure as well as to determine when the rotating machinery operation is normal.